Muskrat
Stocky aquatic rodent with a vertically flattened tail, compact lodge, and busy wetland feeding routes
Indiana, United States: places and wildlife — page 2
Browse the published Explore collection for Indiana, United States. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.
American Mink
Dark, low-slung mustelid moving quickly along water edges while hunting on land and underwater
Thirteen-lined Ground Squirrel
Slender ground squirrel striped with alternating pale lines and spots, often upright beside prairie burrows
Prairie Vole
Small blunt-faced vole hidden within woven runways beneath dense grass, seldom crossing open ground
Bullsnake
Large blotched snake that hisses loudly, imitates a rattlesnake convincingly, but remains nonvenomous
Plains Garter Snake
Striped garter snake with a bold orange-yellow back stripe, especially at home near prairie wetlands
Nebraska Conehead
A loud summer katydid reveals itself by a buzz longer than a second, repeated about every two seconds, before its black-bottomed head cone comes into view.
Periodical Cicadas
Missouri’s periodical cicadas are not an annual attraction: the forest-wide chorus arrives only when a mapped 13- or 17-year brood emerges.
Common Eastern Firefly
The familiar summer flash is a coded courtship signal, with each species using its own timing, height, and shape in darkness.
Luna Moth
A luna moth’s luminous green adult life lasts roughly a week, devoted entirely to finding a mate rather than eating.
Purple Coneflower
A familiar garden flower becomes more interesting in the wild, where its stiff cone feeds pollinators in summer and finches in winter.
Cardinal Flower
Few Missouri flowers match cardinal flower’s red, a color and tubular shape tuned especially well to hummingbird vision and bills.
Flowering Dogwood
Dogwood’s famous white “petals” are actually bracts framing a compact bouquet of tiny true flowers.
Eastern Black Walnut
Black walnut combines valuable dark timber with a green-husked fruit whose hidden shell demands patience from squirrels and people alike.
Black-capped Chickadee
Black cap, white cheeks, small bib, and a curious approach make this year-round northern songbird a foundational backyard identification.
Osprey
Dark eye stripe, kinked long wings, and reversible outer toes identify the fish specialist nesting beside Oregon waters.
Largemouth Bass
A jaw extending behind the eye, deep body, and dark side stripe separate largemouth bass from their smaller-mouthed relatives.
Bluegill
A deep compressed body, dark ear flap, and blue-green cheek identify a widespread sunfish that rewards close looking.
Northern Pike
Duckbill snout, rear-set fins, and pale bean-shaped spots identify the pike waiting almost motionless beside cover.
Monarch Butterfly
Orange wings with heavy black veins identify a migrant whose caterpillars can eat only milkweeds and whose journey outlasts any one summer adult.
Common Green Darner
Large size, bright green thorax, and a dark bull’s-eye on the forehead help identify a darner capable of continental movement.
Black Swallowtail
Paired rows of yellow spots and an orange-centered hindwing eye distinguish a butterfly whose striped caterpillar feeds on carrots’ wild relatives.
Say’s Firefly
A dark firefly with pale margins and an angular shield pattern, Say’s firefly turns summer dusk into species-specific communication.
Large-flowered Trillium
Three broad leaves, three white petals, and a flower held above a single whorl mark Ohio’s woodland wildflower.
Common Milkweed
Opposite broad leaves, milky sap, round pink flower clusters, and warty pods identify a plant central to monarch development.
Northern Red Oak
Bristle-tipped leaf lobes, shallow-striped bark, and broad acorns distinguish New Jersey’s state tree from rounded-lobed white oaks.
Tulip Tree
Four-lobed leaves with a notched flat tip and green-orange tulip-like flowers identify one of eastern North America’s tallest hardwoods.
Eastern Hemlock
Flat short needles with pale undersides, tiny hanging cones, and drooping twig tips identify Pennsylvania’s state tree.
Red Maple
Red buds, flowers, leaf stalks, and paired winged seeds recur across the year on Rhode Island’s adaptable state tree.
Eastern White Pine
Long flexible needles grouped in fives, slender cones, and layered horizontal branches identify the eastern white pine.
Northern Mockingbird
Arkansas’s state bird patrols open neighborhood territories, flashing white wings and stitching other birds’ sounds into long improvised songs.
Swamp Rabbit
Louisiana’s largest cottontail lives close to water, swims readily, and hides in dense floodplain cover where most observers see only tracks or a bounding tail.
Bald Cypress
Louisiana’s state tree is a deciduous conifer built for floodplain life, capable of forming ancient forests where buttressed trunks rise from seasonal water.
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis
Five floors of science, world cultures, dinosaurs, art, and play make the world’s largest children’s museum a rare place where preschoolers and adults can stay equally absorbed.
Newfields
Newfields joins the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Lilly House and gardens, seasonal installations, and a 100-acre art-and-nature park into a visit with several distinct rhythms.
Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art
Native art and cultures, Western art, contemporary voices, and Indiana’s own collecting history meet in a museum that rewards careful reading of who is speaking—and when.
Indiana State Museum
Geology, ecology, archaeology, social history, art, and invention turn a state survey into an argument about how place shapes people and how people reshape place.
Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum
Cars, trophies, driver stories, engineering, strategy, and an active racetrack make the reimagined museum useful even to visitors who do not arrive as racing experts.
Conner Prairie
Prairietown, Lenape interpretation, aviation, animals, nature, and a new indoor museum turn a sprawling living-history campus into more than a costumed village.
Studebaker National Museum
Three floors follow a South Bend company from blacksmith shop to global automaker, using surviving vehicles to make design, labor, ambition, and collapse tangible.
Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum
Auburn, Cord, and Duesenberg automobiles occupy the company’s restored 1930 headquarters, where architecture, advertising, engineering, and Indiana manufacturing still speak together.
Indiana Medical History Museum
The 1896 Old Pathology Building preserves laboratories, amphitheater, specimens, records, and uneasy evidence of how psychiatric medicine once pursued knowledge inside Central State Hospital.
WonderLab Museum of Science, Health & Technology
Bubbles, water, forces, live animals, sound, and construction turn a compact downtown museum into a laboratory for testing ideas with hands and bodies.
Evansville Museum of Arts, History & Science
Art galleries, regional history, hands-on science, a planetarium, and a preserved train make one Ohio River museum unusually broad without losing its local center.
Eskenazi Museum of Art
Ancient objects, prints, photographs, and modern art meet in a free university museum whose triangular building constantly changes how one work faces another.
Fort Wayne Museum of Art
Changing exhibitions, American glass, works on paper, and regional artists give this downtown museum a focused identity that reaches beyond a single permanent display.
Indiana War Memorial Museum
A limestone memorial, soaring Shrine Room, military artifacts, and Hoosier biographies frame service from the Revolution through recent conflicts without reducing it to hardware.
Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library
Manuscripts, drawings, a typewriter, a Purple Heart, banned-book advocacy, and an Indiana Avenue home place Vonnegut’s jokes inside the moral questions that powered them.